R E V I E W A R T I C L E Evolution of Nutritional Management of Acute Malnutrition MICHAEL H GOLDEN Emeritus Professor, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Correspondence to: Pollgorm, Ardbane, Downings, County Donegal, Ireland. [email protected], [email protected] Wasting, kwashiorkor and stunting are not usually due to either protein or energy deficiency. Treatment based upon this concept results in high mortality rates, and failure of treated children to return physiologically to normal. They become relatively obese with insufficient lean tissue. Preventive strategies have also failed. Wasting and stunting are primarily due to deficiency of type II nutrients and kwashiorkor probably due to deficiency of several type I nutrients that confer resistance to oxidative stress. Modern dietary treatments are based upon the F75 formula whilst the child is sick without an appetite, followed by F100 for rapid gain of weight. Derivative, ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTF) allow treatment of large numbers of children at home, are preferred by mothers and dramatically improve coverage. Children are indentified by screening in the community and treated before complications arise, using simple protocols. Successful treatment of the sick children with severe malnutrition not only depends upon these products, but appropriate management of complications. The physiology of the malnourished child is completely different from the normal child and many drugs and treatments that are safe in children with normal physiology are fatal for the malnourished child. In particular, the diagnosis and management of diarrhea and dehydration is different in the malnourished child. Giving standard treatment frequently leads to circulatory overload and death from heart failure. The challenge now is to find successful local ways to prevent malnutrition and achieve nutritional security. Until prevention works, we have to rely on fortified foods for treatment and convalescence from illness. Key words: F100, Malnutrition, RUTF, Therapy, Treatment. he treatment of severe malnutrition has that cannot be adequately resisted because of the been dominated by concepts of its physiological and immunological changes. etiology. Recently these concepts have HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Tchanged dramatically. Instead of administering abundant protein and energy and Malnutrition has been recognized for millennia as treating the complications as one would do in a being due to a shortage of food. Ancel Keys lists normal child, the pathophysiological changes and many of the famines recorded in history(1) which detailed studies of the metabolism of individual disappeared when the normal diet of the population nutrients have been used to formulate diets and returned. Kwashiorkor as a separate entity was guidelines for the management of severe malnutri- recognized early in Latin America and called “multi- tion and its complications. This has resulted in a deficiency syndrome”(2) and in Europe as “flour dramatic fall in case fatality rates. It should be dystrophy”(3). Later it was described from Africa by emphasized that nearly all physiological, biochemi- Cecile Williams in the English literature(4-6), given cal and immunological systems in the body are the name kwashiorkor, and recorded as responding changed in the malnourished individual. This is to milk. After a brief argument whether this was a brought about by a mixture of reductive adaptation to form of pellagra(7) most experts accepted that the the inadequate intake, nutritional imbalance and cause was protein deficiency(8-11), a view that has deficiency of specific nutrients and to the resulting persisted(12) particularly among those who invested effects of infection and other environmental stresses their life’s work investigating protein metabolism INDIAN PEDIATRICS 667 VOLUME 47__AUGUST 17, 2010 MICHAEL H GOLDEN TREATMENT OF A CUTE MALNUTRITION and deficiency on the basis that it would illuminate restriction of protein in the diet of malnourished kwashiorkor. children. In Somalia mortality fell when protein was restricted in the diets of severely malnourished adult Marasmus was thought to be due to energy patients(28) (mortality on high and moderate protein deficiency as failure to give sufficient energy always diets – edematous 51% vs 25%, P<0.05, marasmic leads to weight loss and dietary surveys showed a 22% vs 13%, P = 0.08). There then developed the low energy intake in marasmic children. Starvation concept of kwashiorkor being due to a lack of was studied extensively during and after the Second antioxidant nutrients(29,30), a hypothesis which has World War(1) and the etiology assumed to apply to not been confirmed by intervention trials(31) despite marasmic children. This led to the treatment of all evidence of oxidative damage in the same types of malnutrition with high-protein, high-energy population(32). diets and the naming of these forms of malnutrition as first protein-calorie malnutrition and then protein- It is incontrovertible that if sufficient food is not energy malnutrition (which is still the Index Medicus taken, for whatever reason, the child will lose weight and International Classification of Diseases and become marasmic. This was interpreted as nomenclature). energy deficiency and the treatment response was to give additional energy in the diet. Furthermore, PROTEIN AND ENERGY DEFICIENCY metabolic studies showed that wasted children’s rates of weight gain were closely related to their The first real attack on the protein deficiency theory energy intake. For this reason, the energy density of of kwashiorkor came from Gopalan(13) where he the diets was increased by the addition of lipid (33- found that the antecedent diets of children with 35) to limits where water deficiency and hyper- kwashiorkor and marasmus were not different in natraemic dehydration were real possibilities. The terms of protein, a finding that has since been reason for the decreased energy intake could of confirmed(14,15). Shrikantia then ascribed the course be starvation, and it is notable that those that edema of kwashiorkor to the antidiuretic effects of get marasmus are almost always dependent upon ferritin, which he found elevated in edematous others for food: infants and children, prisoners, the malnutrition(16,17). This seminal work was elderly, infirm, mentally ill and indigent. discounted internationally because the paper was not in a peer reviewed journal and the electrolyte pattern APPETITE did not usually accord with an antidiuretic effect. Importantly, there was no alternative paradigm at One of the clinical features of nearly all that time so that the protein hypothesis was not malnourished children is a loss of appetite and a abandoned. flattening of affect. It does not take much of a reduction in appetite to cause a loss of weight. Thus, The next advance was to show that children if body tissue requires 5 kcal to synthesize one gram could lose all their edema without a change in plasma of tissue(36), and a similar shortfall in intake will albumin level(18) and that protein intake was not cause a loss of one gram of tissue, then a child whose associated with rates of recovery(19). Furthermore, energy requirement for maintenance is 100 kcal/kg/ the high ferritin values found by Srikantia were also d, but takes only 90 kcal/kg/d, to give a shortfall of confirmed(20). These children have liver dys- 10 kcal/kg/d, will lose 2 g/kg/d. In 10 days the child function with reduced levels of amino acid will lose 2% of body weight and in 3 months 20% of metabolizing enzymes and abnormal urinary body weight to be classified as malnourished metabolites(21-27). One would not give high levels (assuming no metabolic adaptation). of protein to a child with an inborn error of amino- acid metabolism. It is unfortunate that the studies of Appetite is a measure of metabolic wellbeing. It the livers of malnourished children, showing similar is particularly disturbed with liver dysfunction, defects, albeit acquired, should not have been during the metabolic response to infection(37) and translated into clinical practice and led to the with deficiency of certain essential nutrients. During INDIAN PEDIATRICS 668 VOLUME 47__AUGUST 17, 2010 MICHAEL H GOLDEN TREATMENT OF A CUTE MALNUTRITION these conditions, loss of appetite is the main reason poor then when weight is lost from an infection, for weight loss(37,38); with infection, during there will be insufficient type II nutrient density to convalescence with a good diet there is an increased allow for catch-up growth during convalescence. appetite and regain of lost weight(39). The studies Zinc is frequently the limiting type II nutrient, that show a relationship between infection and although not always(52); the effect of zinc on malnutrition are cross-sectional statistical analyses – convalescence from diarrhea, now a world-wide this effect is not seen with longitudinal studies where WHO promoted intervention, is simply a specific under normal circumstances acute infection does not example of a general phenomenon. There has to be result in wasting(40,41) after convalescence. sufficient and the right balance of type II nutrients in Provision of improved sanitation, although it the diet to promote convalescence. If the diets were prevents diarrhea has no effect on malnutrition adequate there would be no requirement for zinc prevalence(42); some reviews that suggest the supplements for the recovering child. Perhaps the opposite are highly critical of any study that does not supplement